You must be self-motivated and able to work independently. We have
a thriving community of interested developers on the IRC channel and
mailing lists, and we're eager to work with you, brainstorm about design,
and so on, but you need to be able to manage your own time, and you
need to already be somewhat familiar with how free software development on the
Internet works.

Working on Tor is rewarding because:

You can work your own hours in your own locations. As long as you
get the job done, we don't care about the process.

We only write free (open source) software. The tools you make won't
be locked down or rot on a shelf.

You will work with a world-class team of anonymity experts and
developers on what is already the largest and most active strong anonymity
network ever.

The work you do could contribute to academic publications —
Tor development raises many open questions and interesting problems
in the field of anonymity
systems.

The best way to get involved is to come listen on IRC (both "#tor" and "#tor-dev"), read
our docs and other webpages, try out the various tools that are related to
the projects that interest you, and ask questions as they come to you: Getting up to speed.

In addition to getting some more development work
done on Tor and related applications, Google and Tor are most interested
in getting students involved in Tor development in a way that keeps them
involved after the summer too. That means we will give priority to students
who have demonstrated continued interest and responsiveness. We will require
students to write public status report updates for our community, either by
blogging or sending mail to our mailing list. We want to ensure that the
community and the student can both benefit from each other.

When it comes time for us to choose projects, our impression of how well
you'll fit into our community — and how well you are at taking
the initiative to do things — will be at least as important as
the actual project you'll be working on.

To start with, please see Tor's projects page and its following
ideas.

The best kind of ideas are well defined and easily broken into subtasks.
A lot of students try to bite off open-ended development and research
topics. But if you're going to spend the first half of your summer figuring
out what exactly you should code, there's a chance that the conclusion will
be "oh, that isn't actually feasible to build after all" and your proposal
will make us very nervous.

Try to figure out how much you can actually fit in a summer, break the work
down into manageable pieces, and most importantly, figure out how to make
sure your incremental milestones are actually useful — if you don't
finish everything in your plan, we want to know that you'll still have
produced something useful.

Please use the following template for your application, to make sure you
provide enough information for us to evaluate you and your proposal.

What project would you like to work on? Use our ideas lists as a starting
point or make up your own idea. Your proposal should include high-level
descriptions of what you're going to do, with more details about the
parts you expect to be tricky. Your proposal should also try to break
down the project into tasks of a fairly fine granularity, and convince
us you have a plan for finishing it. A timeline for what you will be doing
throughout the summer is highly recommended.

Note that we might share which project ideas have strong applications in
order to spread applicants out (it's bad for everyone for several strong
applicants to be for the exact same project).

Point us to a code sample: something good and clean to demonstrate
that you know what you're doing, ideally from an existing project.

Why do you want to work with The Tor Project in
particular?

Tell us about your experiences in free software development
environments. We especially want to hear examples of how you have
collaborated with others rather than just working on a project by
yourself.

Will you be working full-time on the project for the summer, or will
you have other commitments too (a second job, classes, etc)? If you won't
be available full-time, please explain, and list timing if you know them
for other major deadlines (e.g. exams). Having other activities isn't
a deal-breaker, but we don't want to be surprised.

Will your project need more work and/or maintenance after the summer
ends? What are the chances you will stick around and help out with that
and other related projects?

What is your ideal approach to keeping everybody informed of your
progress, problems, and questions over the course of the project? Said
another way, how much of a "manager" will you need your mentor to be?

What school are you attending? What year are you, and what's your
major/degree/focus? If you're part of a research group, which one?

How can we contact you to ask you further questions? Google doesn't
share your contact details with us automatically, so you should include
that in your application. In addition, what's your IRC nickname?
Interacting with us on IRC will help us get to know you, and help you
get to know our community.

Are you applying to other projects for GSoC and, if so, what would be
your preference if you're accepted to both? Having a stated preference
helps with the deduplication process and will not impact if we accept your
application or not.

Is there anything else that we should know that will make us like your
project more?

We mostly pick mentors from the core Tor
development team so we should be able to accommodate a wide variety of
projects. These can range from work on Tor itself to work on supporting or
peripheral projects.

All selected projects are assigned both a primary and assistant mentor to
answer your questions and help you integrate with the broader Tor
community. Though your mentors are a primary point of contact please use
our public spaces (the #tor-dev irc
channel and tor-dev@
email list) to discuss your project. We want you to become a part of
the community by the end of the summer, not a stranger that's only known by
your mentor.

We're always happy to have new contributors so if you haven't filled up
your summer plans yet, please consider spending some time working with us
to make Tor better!